Ever wondered what an authoritarian leader’s address to the nation sounds like? Look no further than President Donald Trump’s longest State of the Union address.

His speech on Tuesday flitted between fanciful and false boasts about the economy and promises of policies to lower prices that will never happen, to dire fear-mongering about unwanted and subversive minorities who commit fraud and murder, which Trump floridly described with titillating glee. And don’t forget the heroic guests, many of whom were awarded national medals during the live event, to serve as props.

This was a speech befitting who Trump ultimately is, an unpopular tyrant trying to sell the public on ignoring what’s right before their eyes with a mix of fear, positive thinking and Hollywood magic. But he brought to it a modern spin: Call it dread and circuses.

We are witnessing “a turnaround for the ages” as “factories, jobs, investment, and trillions of dollars will continue pouring into the United States of America,” Trump boasted. Prices are no longer rising but “plummeting downward” from the “worst inflation in the history of our country.” Meanwhile, “incomes are rising fast” and the “roaring economy is roaring like never before.” (Not that it needs to be said at this point, but none of this is true.)

At the same time, this “golden age” is filled with brutal and violent death that could meet you right around the corner. You could come home to find your daughter “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely after being stabbed 25 times.” Or your “beautiful daughter — so beautiful, what a beautiful young woman,” could be “viciously slashed [with] a knife through her neck and body.” Or perhaps you will be “shot violently in the head.” The culprit of all these crimes: immigrants ― and, of course, Democrats.

Oh, and look, the U.S. men’s hockey team, which just won Olympic gold, is marching out of the press gallery to bask in glorious applause. Let’s give the goalie a medal and a soldier a purple heart.

And there’s more to come. Housing prices will come down, but housing values will also stay the same. “[W]e want to keep those values up,” Trump said. Health insurance “[c]osts were going to go way up, and that’s what happened, and now I’m bringing them way down.” (Health insurance premiums rose this year by the largest amount in years.) Prescription drug prices, meanwhile, will drop by an impossible “300, 400, 500, 600% and more.” And energy prices will go down because AI companies have pledged ― pledged! ― to Trump that they will only use power plants they build to power their data centers.

This mode of governance is not too distant from the tyranny that the Roman poet Juvenal described when he coined the phrase “bread and circuses,” now understood to mean a strategy of political distraction, nearly 2,000 years ago. The Roman people had given up their right to self-rule to a tyrant who offered them bread ― food provisions from the city’s dole ― and circuses: cheap entertainment in the form of games and Coliseum fights (don’t forget to tune in to the UFC fight at the White House later this year).

Trump dismisses the people and their representative institutions, and instead offers cheap thrills, pie-in-the-sky promises that he alone can fill, and fears of disfavored minority groups to both arouse and paralyze not necessarily America as a whole, but the base he can already count on.

At the State of the Union speech, a venue that in recent years has been understood as preaching to the converted, Trump leaned into the friendly audience. He never once made an attempt to pitch his policies to the political middle, let alone to Democrats. The only true Americans are Republicans, or at least people who support him. This speech was a pitch entirely to them while being directly insulting to anyone else.

“These people are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy,” Trump said about Democratic lawmakers after they did not stand up to cheer at one point. Adding, “Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we, huh?”

This version of Trumpian rhetoric is coming out at a time when Trump is struggling. His approval numbers are cratering. Public dissent is bigger and louder than he has ever previously had to confront. His signature policies — deportation and lowering prices — have left a majority of Americans disapproving or unimpressed at best.

But for Trump — who has “joked” about canceling elections where his party is expected to do poorly — the vision of his presidency as a form of tyranny was clear throughout.

Voting is a “privilege,” Trump said, notably not calling it a right as he pitched passage of the SAVE Act, which would radically restrict voting access and potentially disenfranchise millions. That bill, which has passed the House but faces no chance of passage in the Senate, is designed, allegedly by its authors, to stop non-citizens from voting ― a practically non-existent problem. But Trump made sure to add that the bill would also stop “others, who are unpermitted persons, from voting in our sacred American elections.” Of course, he made coy nods to his false claim that he won the 2020 election, lies that led to an attack on the building he was speaking in.

This was also one of just three legislative proposals that Trump put forward to Congress in his State of the Union. And all three were requests to codify executive orders or deals he made with other countries. Usually presidents, in their addresses to Congress, ask something of the legislature. But Trump didn’t ask for more tariff authorization after the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he said.

This is the vision of a system of government where the president acts without Congress, where the opposition is “the enemy with,” as Trump put it in the 2024 election, and where the president decides who gets to vote in elections. That is a fundamentally tyrannical vision.

But it’s an open question whether the American people, beyond those who already support Trump, are going to buy any of this. Despite his pitch of distraction and dread, elections remain free and fair. And Republicans keep losing them.

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